You're doing it wrong! OMG FAIL!
While I was sitting on a group call the other night with some of my classmates from Intro to Japanese and listening to this girl be obnoxious to the teacher, it occured to me that the internet has indeed made some people shockingly stupid.
The problem is that people are so used to flaming everyone on message boards and social media sites that they get a little too used to doing it and think that it’s okay to do it all of the time. For example my teacher (keep in mind this is the first group session) asked if everyone was at a computer and had the class site open, and obnoxious weaboo girl says “we’re obviously at a computer, how else would be we on skype?” She also proceeded to correct everyone on their pronunciation and inform everyone that she had been teaching herself Japanese for several years now. (That always translates to: I totally fucking love Naruto and I made my mom buy me Rosetta Stone.) After several more witty comments, the teacher finally asked her to leave the call (you know you’re off to a good start then) to which she said she didn’t mind staying on because she was used to having to go slower than she’d like because everyone else was so much slower than her. She finally left the call after several rather unsubtle hints and things progressed normally after that, but that made me wonder why someone would be so overtly obnoxious to not just a teacher, but to a teacher that you’re supposed to be extra polite to in deference to her being a sensei in a Japanese class.
Then when you start looking at the way people generally treat each other on the inernet, where they don’t think twice about flaming someone for an innocent remark or for not liking Arashi as much as they do, someone who spends vast amounts of time on the internet would lose the ability to have a normal conversation with normal people in the real world. I have often wondered what the truly obnoxious people are like in real life. I know that some of them are really quiet and shy in person, then when they hop on the message boards they’re a bitter little flame thrower. Some, as I found out the other night, are just unberable to talk to for any amount of time because they’re horribly obnoxious.
So here’s a little piece of advice; you’re really better off just not flaming anyone on the internet because it’s pointless and stupid in the first place, but if you are going to be that person, don’t actually do it in real life, because there’s a decent chance someone will punch you in the face repeatedly (and everyone around will cheer.)